Tag: misc

This editorial was originally published on June 15, 2013. It is being re-run for the New Year holiday.

I was reading a piece recently about the problems many new college graduates will face as they enter the workforce. There are less and less jobs available in many industries and a large reason for this is the advances in technology that have eliminated many jobs. Technology has made people more efficient, allowing companies to hire less staff. Or at least management thinks less staff is needed. New applications and devices have allowed self service operations for many types of tasks that might have required an employee in the past. This is a trend that is likely to continue.

Do we just need less people working in the world? I don’t think so. For every job we eliminate, there are new opportunities that come about. Unfortunately the new openings often require different skills from the position eliminated, which means that often the person who lost the job can’t take advantage of the new opening without some re-tooling of their skills.

Those of us in technology find ourselves moving from place to place, learning new skills and technologies easily because that’s the nature of the business. However in many other fields, it’s not as easy for individuals to gain new skills. This Friday I wanted to ask those in technology if they think about the impact their work has on others.

Do you feel guilty about the jobs that technology eliminates?

I used to feel that it was up to everyone to ensure they could find a new job if they lost their current one. It seemed to be a capitalist market idea that change will occur, new industries will arise as old ones die, and everyone ought to be prepared to transition to a new career. However technology seems to hasten the process, and so many people do not seem to be able to make the change quickly to a new field or a new industry.

Or perhaps they are too slow to embrace the idea of change.

I feel that technology has made the world better overall, and the tremendous amount of data that we capture, analyze, and use to make decisions allows the world to function better. We have room for improvement, and we certainly have security and privacy concerns, but we do need to find solutions to those problems and prepare for change in the future. We also need to make sure the next generation also understands that they will need to be more flexible and better trained than in the past.

Steve Jones

What do you think will happen in the database world in 2017?

That’s a question I want to ask you today, the last work day of 2016. When most of us come back to work next week, a new year starts, though it won’t really mean much to most of us. We’ll continue on with the projects we’ve been working on, managing the same systems and dealing with similar issues to those we face today. Budgets may reset, which could be a good thing if you can find a way to divert some of that money for your own training or pet project use. In general, next week will just be a continuation of the work many of us have been doing.

If I look forward and try to imagine where 2017 will take us, I envision focus in a few areas, and perhaps a few things that won’t change. As much as I find the progress our industry has made in the last ten years amazing, I also think that year to year we tend to make small changes. It’s rare that a huge advance in computing drives us forward. Usually we can see the technology emerge, gain momentum, and then grow very quickly. That happened with SSDs. The first models were exciting, and expensive, but also prone to failure and burnout. Across a few years, quality improved, prices dropped, and all of a sudden most new machines now use SSDs. In fact, it seems most people working with databases wouldn’t consider purchasing hardware without at least some SSD storage.

There’s a lot of media attention being paid to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning these days, and I think these will grow more rapidly in 2017. As we get more tools that make it easier to build applications that incorporate AI and ML, I envision pressure on many developers to begin incorporating these features into applications. Those that are able to do this effectively will likely help their organizations gain a significant advantage over competitors. The maintenance and evolution of these systems is harder than expected. While our tooling will lower the bar to get started, my suspicion is that most of the applications that get built will not provide the expected results and will get abandoned.

That brings me to the second area that I think will grow in 2017. Data Science, and the idea of somehow analyzing all the Big Data (from 2015) to gain amazing new insights will be an even bigger focus in 2017. The media attention and hype have so many managers thinking they need more data science. The interest means higher paychecks, which have everyone that passed Introduction to Statistics in university claiming some data science skills to get a larger paycheck. This will snowball in 2017, as more and more people on both sides press the issue.

The reality is that data science and more complex analysis is hard. It’s much harder than most people realize, requiring lots of knowledge and patience to experiment with data. I’m not sure that most people are willing to make the investment in time and resources that it takes to become a good data scientist. Of course, if it’s like many of the other career paths in technology, even average skills can end up with a successful career.

Security will continue to be a problem, especially as more and more hackers continue to probe organizations and systems for vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Some do this for profit, some (maybe most) for basic vandalism, but we’ll continue to find SQL Injection, phishing, and other attack vectors to be problems. As we connect more and more systems together, and as there is pressure to build more distributed systems, whether with cloud services or business partners, we will have more and more weak points. I wish I could say that 2017 would be the year that our aging systems will see pressure to improve their security and patch more rapidly, I suspect that far, far too many large organizations will continue to tolerate poorly written systems (from a security standpoint) and allow their developers to deploy code that doesn’t remotely adhere to best coding practices. Perhaps one day…

In our SQL Server world, I think we’re going to have an interesting year. All signs point to another SQL Server version, one that runs on both Windows and Linux, so we’ll start to have the challenges and excitement of moving databases across platforms. Add in the ability to run inside containers, and I think we’ll see some crazy growth in SQL Server deployments that will stretch the ability of administrators to keep track of how many instances are actually running. I suspect that we’ll see lots of data loss from small instances that are deployed by developers quickly and easily, without a backup plan. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a whole new set of issues when transaction logs grow to fill disks from instances running in containers that never back them up. Maybe we’ll get the simple recovery model as the default for SQL Server 2017? I can hope.

All in all, I think 2017 is just another new year, but it is the time for you to take stock of your life, decide what you like, what you don’t, and where you want to go. Perhaps you should take another step on your epic life quest, maybe you want to improve your skills, maybe you want to find a new job, or perhaps you have something outside of work that will be important this year. No matter where you are in life, the end of one year and beginning of a new one is a good time to reflect, reminisce, and dream about the future.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 7.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

As we approach the Christmas holiday, this is a time when work usually slows down and many of us spend some time trying to relax and recharge away from the challenges and responsibilities we face in technology. Unless you work in an organization that looks to profit from the holiday, I suspect this is the slowest time of the year for you. Budgets haven’t been decided for the new year and many of us aren’t pressured with deadlines between Christmas and New Years.

Since lots of us might have some extra time, I thought I’d ask the question about what might entertain you across the next few weeks. I’m sure a few of you have some ideas, perhaps something to catch up on that might be geek related. I’m also guessing that some of you don’t have any plans, and might be looking for something to entertain and distract you.

Today I’m asking you to share with everyone a way that you might spend some of your time away from work the next two weeks. Perhaps there’s a science fiction book you’ve been wanting to read. Maybe there’s a geeky movie or TV show that you’d like to see. Perhaps you’re working on maker project that’s fun, like building a drone, a clock, or some other technological gadget. Or maybe you’re doing something non technical. Perhaps you’ve got a cooking project or a car improvement, or just want to learn how to open a lock.

I’ll be traveling in Ireland for the next week with my family, so we likely won’t be tackling any projects, but I am going to try and read The Three Body Problem, on a recommendation from my oldest. Other than that, if I find time, I might see if I can convince my family to watch some of the classic sci fi I haven’t seen yet.

Have a great holiday, and share some of your ideas for leisure activities this week and I’ll be back after Christmas.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.